HARD TIMES AT MONTICELLO - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 118

The cold summer of 1816, followed by the continuing poor harvest years of 1816-20,
represented a personal crisis for Jefferson at many levels. In economic terms, he faced decis-
ive ruin. His wheat crops withered in the frosts and drought, plunging him deeper into the
longstanding debts from which he would never escape. At the moral and intellectual level,
however, he faced perhaps an even greater crisis. If the weather in North America was actu-
ally getting colder as the years went by, and the climate less hospitable for agriculture, didn't
the entire Jeffersonian argument for an agrarian republic come crumbling to the ground, not
to mention westward expansion? In an 1817 letter, he expressed open concern about the fate
of his Monticello farm “if the seasons should, against the course of nature hitherto observed,
continue constantly hostile to our agriculture.” 11 Selling up Monticello would be more than a
personal embarrassment or economic hardship; it would represent the collapse of his romant-
ic, lifelong vision for agricultural America. Must he now, as an old man, acknowledge that
the European climate pessimists had been right in the end? That the United States—despite
the heroic efforts of its yeoman-citizens in clearing and plowing the land—must be classified
among the irredeemable places of the Earth, in the words of celebrated French scientist the
Comte de Buffon, “des terres ingrates, froides, et denuées”—an ungrateful land, cold and bar-
ren ? 12
COLD NEW WORLD …
In the opening of his landmark essay “Des époques de la nature” (1778), Buffon describes the
creation of the world in the collision of a comet with the sun. From this fiery beginning, our
immolated planet gradually cooled, and was cooling still. In fact, the gradual refrigeration
of the earth would necessarily continue—an idea that returned to haunt the Shelleys as they
toured the Alps in 1816—until the Earth was “colder than ice” and bereft of life. 13 Until that
long-distant date, however, the originary heat emanating from the Earth's core provided the
life-principle of the animate world by setting the temperature of its various regions. Climate,
by Buffon's formulation, equaled temperature. And temperature, in turn, determined the rel-
ative “energy” and fecundity of nature around the globe.